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“... Blake’s father was Albert Behar, whose Sephardic Jewish family cut him off with less than the proverbial shilling because of his marriage to a Dutch Christian woman called Catherine Beijdedvellen. Behar Senior then became a British citizen, having served in the French Foreign Legion and the British Army. On his death in 1936 – a bad period not only in England but throughout Europe – he left a widow and the young George in somewhat reduced circumstances ...”

“... up a colleague, who was still in office at that time, and said: ‘What should we do? That fellow Boyle has just been to see me, and he’s found out nearly everything.’ No attempts were made subsequently to investigate several other gentlemen, most of them ex-members of MI6, who had greatly assisted me in my inquiries. For it was an open secret, part of ...”

“... of reconciliation with his friends. Newspapers are ‘they’ and we, after all, are ‘we’. As Andrew Boyle relates, it turned out that a great many old acquaintances of Burgess and Maclean were much more horrified – felt, indeed, much more betrayed – by the fact that the late Goronwy Rees gave a version of their flight to the People than by the ...”

“... vivid cases, in the hands of amateurs, but amateurs now with access to a universal audience. Susan Boyle, a 48-year-old spinster from West Lothian, appeared a few weeks ago on the TV show Britain’s Got Talent. ‘I’ve always wanted to perform in front of a large audience,’ she said to the presenters. The programme nets an audience of 11.9 million ...”

“... of a whole nation to cram onto an LED screen the length of Sauchiehall Street, plus they had Susan Boyle, the underdogs’ underdog, who is required by popular edict to sing with the winds of destiny blowing about her skirts. I think the wind machine at Parkhead might have been too strong, though, even for Scotland, clearly blowing the singer’s memory off ...”

“... Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds are in pursuit of Andrew Gow, the Classical scholar and art collector who was Blunt’s mentor at Trinity. Gow, who had taught at Eton, devoted part of his life to editing Nicander, a didactic Greek poet who wrote poems on snake-bites, poisons and their remedies – there is ...”

“... faith in drones, and are hardly challenged in the books that have been written about them. Michael Boyle describes Gorgon Stare, an array of video cameras designed for the Predator B drone, a large-wingspan aircraft that operates at an altitude of 25,000 feet, as offering ‘persistent, wide-area surveillance of small towns’, enabling intelligence analysts ...”

“... men who were Apostles, which of them were homosexuals and so on, Cornish dodgily assuming, as did Andrew Boyle and John Costello before him, that homosexuality is itself a bond and that if two men can be shown to be homosexual the likelihood is that they’re sleeping together. So we trail down that road looking for cliques and coteries with even ...”

“... now he’s thinking of taking acting lessons. Perhaps he had been inspired by the careers of Jimmy Boyle, John McVicar, ‘Dirty Den’ of EastEnders, and Paul Barber, one of the ‘Brothers McGregor’ who also spent some time inside, and who recently claimed in the Sun: ‘Jailed turned me into a ...”

“... not the exclusive preserve of radicals. The aristocratic evangelist and natural philosopher Robert Boyle tried to defend the scriptures by paradoxically confessing their historicity: ‘All the Parts of Scripture are useful in Some Ages, and some in All.’ Slightly later, John Locke pointed out that the letters of St Paul represent only one side of a ...”

“... precisely in their having expunged ‘Romantic’ ideas from their psychology. Part of Mary Boyle’s study of schizophrenia consists in examining quite why the category is used in the way it is: as a taxonomic catch-all that cannot hold, in any useful scientific sense, the varieties of behaviour it is asked to hold at the moment. If the Romantic legacy ...”

“... to be clear about just what is supposed to be constructed. For an extreme example take the book by Andrew Pickering called Constructing Quarks. Pickering does not mean that quarks, as ‘objects’, are socially constructed, but that the idea of the quark was constructed, along with the relevant theories, scientific institutions and apparatus for detecting ...”

“... a Crowd of ill Directions’) but also the latest scientific advances: alongside Newton, Hooke, Boyle, he attended Royal Society meetings where he stammered when he talked in public. ‘Blood has been moved between two dogs for the first time. Before the Society, Mr King and Mr Thomas Coxe successfully performed the experiment on a small bulldog and a ...”

“... there was an increasing homogeneity of casting (the ‘anything with Tara Fitzgerald’ syndrome). Andrew Davies withdrew his adaptation of Angela Lambert’s A Rather English Marriage from the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the ...”

“... one of Evelyn’s friends for most of his life. He also enjoyed what was called, after Robert Boyle had popularised the term, ‘seraphick love’ with Anne Russell (whom he dubbed ‘Platona’) and Elizabeth Carey (who became his ‘Electra’). It is exceptionally hard to describe what Evelyn felt for these women: probably it is best to say that the ...”